One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is such a wonderful book. The range and breadth of situations, challenges, life problems, joy and most profound heartache that run through the story of one family over 100 years is captivating and fascinating. In that regard the story telling and imagination is incredible. Where I personally struggled with it, was in the fact that so many characters had the same name, at the same time. I know many families around the world do that, but reading quite complex family, romantic and political situations when so many people share the same name, just bewildered me and slowed the pace down. Plus, very often the story telling drifted into the fantastical and supernatural - perhaps that was a reflection of the intended time and age (deep religious and supernatural beliefs) but for me, the "magical" situations diluted the serious drama of the core story. So, I really enjoyed this epic tale, but it was not the most easy of reads.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) is an extraordinary novel, as many readers attest. Six or maybe seven generations of the Buendía family are embraced. Hurricanes strike. Political turmoil bursts out and armies are on the march across the landscape of Colombia, motivated by stark but unexplored ideologies. Myth and history run in and out of each other’s spheres, while realistic dialogue and description merge with fantastic asides and episodes. Ghosts, more than memories, invade the present. The railway arrives, as does the cinema; labour wars divide the nation. Meanwhile, incest is present in the history of the Buendía family, which is caught up in bloody and retributive personal and national struggles.The imaginary town of Macondo, founded by the patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, and the narrator seek to hold this extraordinary complexity together, though the surprising lack of substance in the descriptions of the town and the even tone of the narrator – however startling the subject of a sentence – do create a novel that is nearly all mountain peaks and relatively few foothills and plains. Take, as just one example, a passage around which a whole novel or at least a chapter might be constructed but which is soon superceded by another intriguing episode, and then another, probably from fifty years later or earlier:“[Aureliano Segundo] became lost in misty by-ways, in times reserved for oblivion, in labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where echoes repeated one's thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages. After sterile weeks he came to an unknown city where all the bells were tolling a dirge. Although he had never seen them and no one had ever described them to him, he immediately recognised the walls eaten away by bone salt, the broken down wooden balconies gutted by fungus and nailed to the outside door almost erased by rain the saddest cardboard sign in the world: ‘Funeral wreaths for sale’".As a consequence of this excess of memorable writing, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has the effect of going on and on, making it at least a challenge to sustain one’s reading, which, I think, needs ups and downs. Each sentence, even, can exert a fascination but over 400+ pages this is overwhelming, in a way that two writers who also make place matter and for whom time cam be, at once, the present and the past – James Joyce, in "Ulysses", and William Faulkner, in "Absalom, Absalom!" – seem to avoid, possibly because their prose, while equally mesmeric, is able to shift register, for instance, between gothic melodrama and poor-white regional vernacular in Faulkner. Marquez’s novel is remarkable but not as moving as I had expected, though the conclusion is aesthetically satisfying. I shall now try “Love in a Time of Cholera” (1985).

Some say, some books, you should never read again in later life. I’ve heard it said, for instance, that having enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye when one was seventeen, that it is a mistake to return to it in middle or later years. Thomas Mann prescribes the reading of his The Magic Mountain, “not once, but twice” – though omits to specify any interval. Having just finished reading ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I feel that this is a novel that one could beneficially revisit several times throughout one’s lifetime – say every two decades? And that’s quite a numerically reasonable suggestion because if - as at least two of the many characters in this narrative do – you live to the age of one hundred, that’s only five reads in a lifetime. For me however, there’s a snag. Somehow, when this novel was published and I was seventeen, I slipped through the net of readership, this is my first reading, and now at the age of seventy-three – according to my own perhaps rashly-prepared gospel – quite possibly it will be my only reading!A shame, because this is one of the richest, most dense, detailed, dreamlike, formalist, symbolic, mysterious, magical, funny - I had some good laughs, and some nightmares! – pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Painting equivalents? The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory might give one some idea of the level of detail – not necessarily content – one’s in for.There are twenty-four main protagonists agonising over seven generations of the BUENDIA family in this intense stylish saga which more or less coincides with the crackly political and social history of Colombia between the years 1820 and 1920.Unsurprisingly the plot is baffling. Its weave is not unlike that of a Wilton carpet, so instead of 'U' shaped yarns, the fibre is woven all the way through the carpet and then sheared to create a range of cut and loop textures. Every so often characters pop up to the surface, having travelled invisibly under the substrate for scores of pages, and years. Sometimes without any apparent explanation, build or lead in. The reader might be forgiven in thinking that s/he had one foot in a William Burroughs cut-and-paste text and the other in a David Bowie lyric. It might cause annoyance to a convergent thinker, but just relax and enjoy passages such as; ‘when he asked for the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen on this earth, all the women brought him their daughters. He became lost in misty byways, in figures reserved for oblivion, in the labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one’s thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages.’But there’s much more than the apparently ‘cut-and-paste’ plot. Here are just some of the themes and symbols which go fuguing away throughout the narrative; gold, ice, buried treasure, death – particularly by firing squad, the death of birds flying into things, incest, the invisibility of people, cannibalism, and of course solitude. There are curious repeat mentions of anointings, lye, chamber pots, small candy animals, gypsies, macaws, small golden fishes, the drawing of chalk circles, begonias and the requirement – or not, a political reference – to paint one’s house either blue or red.So, I leave you with a few further almost edible Marquezian phrases; ‘more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his,’ or ‘solitude had made a selection in her memory, and had burned the nostalgic piles of dimming waste that life had accumulated in her heart,’ or how about, ‘the journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem’? But perhaps we should attribute at least some of this tickly prose to Gregory Rabassa his translator?